Conall Morrison’s new play is an eighty minute-long suicide note from an army dirty-tricks merchant on the verge of self-destruction in Northern Ireland. But the “hard to believe” aspect of his story is not the depth of chicanery involved in his manipulation of public image and “turning” activists, or the handling of double-agents. (One dividend of the peace process is the acknowledgment that some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Troubles had their germ of truth.) Rather, the title’s failure of faith refers to the causes of counter-intelligence officer John Foster’s personal alienation from the opposing versions of Christianity in his, and Morrison’s, home town, Armagh, ecclesiastical capital of both dispensations, and in Northern Ireland generally.

In a gripping solo performance, Séan Kearns manages to endow Foster’s abrasive story, its mix of braggadocio and apologia, and its non serviam to both Evangelical grandfather and bigoted Catholic mother, with credible pathos. The violence of rejection is softened by musical excerpts from Schubert and Ravel and the whole Agnus Dei from Bach’s Mass in B minor (Foster’s father was a music teacher).

Sabine Dargent’s set, an attic hung with old clothes, offers a central theme of disguise and dissimulation: Foster’s orphaned mother’s obsession with clothes; the 1970s tank-tops worn by the Four Square Laundry Service’s drivers (the first undercover intelligence operation to be exposed in the Province); his murdered brother’s too-small jacket, his mother’s dress (both incongruous on the well-built Kearns); and the clerical robe his lay-preacher forebear wore to pass himself off as a healing minister, a contrasting prefigurement of Foster’s own divisive role. Divided backgrounds often produce individuals who can see both sides; equally well documented in recent turmoil are those who have chosen extremism as a reaction to-divided loyalties. Foster has, rather, embraced an unbiased hatred for both “houses” and joined what some see as a third party to the conflict, only for it all to end in self-loathing. This production, from Dublin ’s Storytellers Theatre Company, seems to signal - despite the current interest in political theatre as the verbatim reworking of recent events - that drama as a fusion of oral mythmaking and private confession still has work to do.

Public life is again central to private revelation in John Donnelly’s complex Royal Court three-hander, Bone. Scenes of shooting and burning are intercut with impassioned recollections from Helen (played by Brid Brennan, a major figure in Irish drama over the past two decades) of an intense sexual relationship. The contrast invokes Brennan’s earlier performances in the Royal Court’s Ourselves Alone or in Grahain Reid’s “Billy” trilogy of television plays. But the tragedy driving Helen for the next ninety minutes is the cull of foot-andmouth-diseased livestock, which has destroyed her now-missing husband’s livelihood. Helen’s soliloquies are directed at Tom, although the cause of his absence is only slowly revealed.

The stage is institutionally furnished (basic blue seats, coffee-table, water cooler) and Helen’s narrative is spliced with that of two others. Both the layout - the audience looks down into the “room” from two of its four sides - and the on-off lighting suggest, perhaps, reality-TV excerpts, or edited “revelations” being relayed to psychological observers or experts.

Twenty-year-old Jamie’s narrative has most immediate relevance. The eve of his shipping for war (against “foreigners”) becomes an extended crawl from local pub to kebab-shop to night-club, interspersed with fights and standoffs. He provides a long, ugly, but often hilariously observed account of his xenophobia’s genesis in a “foreigner’s” assault on his sister and, further back, in his father’s early absence.

Stephen, black, in his mid-thirties, and played by Don Gilet, has the Everyman role. He is vaguely aware of both farming crisis and 1he war”, but it is his self-deluding account of a very ordinary break-up, his time-wasting office job and the nagging sense that he should be a more caring person which elicit our profoundest sympathy - more sch even, than the horror of watching Helen’s slide to extinction.